Bradbury Stories : 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

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For more than sixty years, the imagination of Ray Bradbury has opened doors into remarkable places, ushering us across unexplored territories of the heart and mind while leading us inexorably toward a profound understanding of ourselves and the universe we inhabit. In this landmark volume, America's preeminent storyteller offers us one hundred treasures from a lifetime of words and ideas.

The stories within these pages were chosen by Bradbury himself, and span a career that blossomed in the pulp magazines of the early 1940s and continues to flourish in the new millennium.

Here are representatives of the legendary author's finest works of short fiction, including many that have not been republished for decades, all forever fresh and vital, evocative and immensely entertaining.

The author of more than thirty books, Ray Bradbury is one of the most celebrated fiction writers of our time. Among his best-known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He has written for the theater and the cinema, including the screenplay for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. In 2000, Bradbury was honored by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Among his most recent works are the novels Let's All Kill Constance, From the Dust Returned -- selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times -- and One More for the Road, a new story collection. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, Marguerite

Introduction

xi

The Whole Town's Sleeping The Rocket

16

(9)

Season of Disbelief

25

(8)

And the Rock Cried Out

33

(21)

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

54

(5)

The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge

59

(14)

The Flying Machine

73

(5)

Heavy-Set

78

(8)

The First Night of Lent

86

(6)

Lafayette, Farewell

92

(8)

Remember Sascha?

100

(7)

Junior

107

(6)

That Woman on the Lawn

113

(12)

February 1999: Ylla

125

(11)

Banshee

136

(12)

One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!

148

(8)

The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair

156

(7)

Unterderseaboat Doktor

163

(11)

Another Fine Mess

174

(8)

The Dwarf

182

(10)

A Wild Night in Galway

192

(5)

The Wind

197

(9)

No News, or What Killed the Dog?

206

(7)

A Little Journey

213

(7)

Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine

220

(23)

The Garbage Collector

243

(5)

The Visitor

248

(12)

The Man

260

(11)

Henry the Ninth

271

(7)

The Messiah

278

(9)

Bang! You're Dead!

287

(11)

Darling Adolf

298

(14)

The Beautiful Shave

312

(3)

Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy

315

(13)

I See You Never

328

(3)

The Exiles

331

(12)

At Midnight, in the Month of June

343

(9)

The Witch Door

352

(9)

The Watchers

361

(14)

2004-05: The Naming of Names

375

(1)

Hopscotch

376

(7)

The Illustrated Man

383

(11)

The Dead Man

394

(9)

June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright

403

(23)

The Burning Man

426

(6)

G.B.S.-Marls V

432

(10)

A Blade of Grass

442

(7)

The Sound of Summer Running

449

(5)

And the Sailor, Home from the Sea

454

(7)

The Lonely Ones

461

(9)

The Finnegan

470

(9)

On the Orient, North

479

(11)

The Smiling People

490

(8)

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl

498

(10)

Bug

508

(7)

Downwind from Gettysburg

515

(14)

Time in Thy Flight

529

(4)

Changeling

533

(6)

The Dragon

539

(3)

Let's Play "Poison"

542

(5)

The Cold Wind and the Warm

547

(15)

The Meadow

562

(14)

The Kilimanjaro Device

576

(9)

The Man in the Rorschach Shirt

585

(10)

Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned

595

(5)

The Pedestrian

600

(4)

Trapdoor

604

(9)

The Swan

613

(11)

The Sea Shell

624

(6)

Once More, Legato

630

(9)

June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air

639

(12)

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone

651

(10)

By the Numbers!

661

(7)

April 2005: Usher II

668

(14)

The Square Pegs

682

(13)

The Trolley

695

(3)

The Smile

698

(5)

The Miracles of Jamie

703

(8)

A Far-away Guitar

711

(9)

The Cistern

720

(6)

The Machineries of Joy

726

(12)

Bright Phoenix

738

(7)

The Wish

745

(6)

The Lifework of Juan Diaz

751

(9)

Time Intervening/Interim

760

(5)

Almost the End of the World

765

(7)

The Great Collision of Monday Last

772

(6)

The Poems

778

(11)

April 2026: The Long Years

789

(10)

Icarus Montgolfier Wright

799

(4)

Death and the Maiden

803

(8)

Zero Hour

811

(9)

The Toynbee Convector

820

(10)

Forever and the Earth

830

(15)

The Handler

845

(9)

Getting Through Sunday Somehow

854

(7)

The Pumpernickel

861

(4)

Last Rites

865

(8)

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse

873

(8)

All on a Summer's Night

881

Bradbury Stories100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

The Whole Town's Sleeping

He was trying to drive me insane. It was the only reason I could think of for why he treated me the way he did: one day all beery and friendly, him and Isaac working together on fixing up my room, letting me sit and listen in on their jam session; then the next morning a maniac again, telling me hands off the stereo and his stupid tools, assigning me chapters in some prehistoric cowboy book I'd never heard of, like I'd landed in remedial reading in summer school. I should have just stayed in Dallas and taken my chances. I should have sat down in the middle of the driveway and refused to get in the car with Ma. Nothing could be worse than this. Except, maybe, one thing; now, all of a sudden, Lucy was in on it, too. When she snatched that Pop-Tart out of my hand I just about died. I know she was just trying to keep me from asking about stuff that was none of my business, but still. I felt stabbed, like she'd all of a sudden switched sides and lined herself up with the devil.

I ran out the door with Dad hollering my name, but he didn't keep it up or come after me, which only proved my point, that he cared more about exerting his brand-new parental supremacy than he did about the actual welfare of me, his daughter. I kept on going, across the road and into the woods, the dogs at my heels.

When I was sure no one was following me, I sat down on a stump and listened. I realized I was close enough to the house to hear what was going on. Sure enough, not two minutes after I left, Dad's truck started up and drove away, and about ten minutes later Lucy's Buick did the same. It was the first time I'd been alone since I'd landed in Mooney, almost a whole week before. I got a little chill of excitement. I could do whatever I wanted. I had no money, no car; to tell the truth, I didn't know how to drive. But I was on my own.

It was nice there, in the woods. I slipped off my headphones and put my Walkman in the pocket of my sweatshirt. High over my head the trees made a canopy of sweet-smelling green, and the ground under my feet was soft with crushed pine needles, and after awhile I could make out the sounds of three or four different birds. The dogs had gotten on the scent of something and started running in circles, then all of a sudden dashed deeper into the woods. I decided to go after them.

I lost sight of them pretty quick, but I could hear them moving around in the underbrush, and I kept going until I came out in a little clearing. I poked around and found the remains of an old building: crumbling steps, a couple of blackened cornerstones, the charred-out hulk of a pot-bellied stove. Everything else, it looked like, the woods had reclaimed.

Then, just beyond the ruined foundation, I discovered an old graveyard. It wasn't much more, really, than a patch of ground, set off by a border of broad, flat stones, but the space inside had been neatly cleared, and the markers, though they looked ancient, were upright and mostly legible. I walked slowly among the stones and read the names and the dates out loud. Eustice Washington had died in 1927, at the age of a hundred and two. Alvin Getty, born 1912, had only lived four days. The most recent stone was 1943, two whole generations ago. There was no question it was a place for spirits, but I felt welcome there. They probably didn't get that many visitors; I figured they were glad to see me.

I sat down on the stone border and looked around. It was a pretty place, with a slash of blue sky overhead and the clean scent of pine all around, and I listened to the dogs and the birds and the wind in the trees until I realized that my heart had stopped pounding and I didn't feel like I needed to cry anymore.

Part of my brain, the sensible part, was telling me to go back to the empty house and throw my stuff into my duffel bag and just get the hell away. But I was less than two months from my fifteenth birthday; my heart, most of the time, felt too small for all the things it was trying to hold. The fact was, I was a little bit in love with East Texas, and with my father and Lucy, too. As confused and sad as I felt, this had in some ways been one of the best weeks of my life. I had been in a honky-tonk, a guitar store, a garden full of Buddhist trinkets, a Baptist church, an old country cemetery. I'd gotten my first lipstickChanel, to boot -- and learned to two-step. I'd eaten more fried chicken in a week than I had the whole rest of my life. My father had turned out to be a better musician than I could have hoped for. There was more music, I knew, where that came from; somewhere were the songs he'd written for me as a colicky baby. Wasn't that proof, no matter how shabby, that he'd loved me once? How could I leave until I had that in my hand?

The dogs came crashing back through the woods into the clearing, looking depressed. Actually, just Booker looked depressed; Steve Cropper wasn't smart enough, I don't think, to realize they'd been after anything, he'd only been along for the ride ...

Excerpted from Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales by Ray Bradbury All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.